


the pain

by elicul



Series: it ends or it doesn't [3]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Pre-Canon, Self-Harm, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 12:37:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19062856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elicul/pseuds/elicul
Summary: Jake deals with his first depressive episode as a teenager. And "deals with" is used loosely.*“That’s a trick.”He’s been in therapy once before and he doesn’t get the point. All it did, the last time, was make the two people he loves most in the world start fighting. They only went to three sessions, all as a family, and it was some of the last days Jake was able to use those words to describe the three of them.“It’s not a trick, Jacob."





	the pain

**Author's Note:**

> title from caitlyn siehl poem "it ends or it doesn't"   
> TWs in end note

“Can you tell me what brings you here today?”

“My mom drove me.”

Laurie tsks. It is the first of many “you can do better” sounds that his new therapist will make in their next year together. “You must know that’s not what I meant.”

“It answers the question, though. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? Answering questions?”

“Is that what you think we’ll be doing here?”

“That’s a trick.” Jake pulls his hands inside of his sleeves. He has three scabs on his left wrist, below an arrangement of thin bracelets, and he isn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing them. 

He’s been in therapy once before and he doesn’t get the point. All it did, the last time, was make the two people he loves most in the world start fighting. They only went to three sessions, all as a family, and it was some of the last days Jake was able to use those words to describe the three of them. 

His dad is long gone by now, and his mom. She seems lost. She’s taken up knitting, recently, though she’s horrendous at it. She can barely look up from her projects to talk to him. And she says it’s because she feels like she can’t say anything right around him anymore, which he remembers her saying to his dad, and so they’ve mostly stopped talking. 

“It’s not a trick, Jacob. I’m just looking to see what you think the point of being here is. If you’re resistant to treatment, that’ll just be the first of our obstacles to hurdle together.”

He only shrugs.

 

Last week, Jake had his last day of his sophomore year. It was three weeks before the end of the semester, and he didn’t take any of his finals, but his mom had managed to convince the family doctor to tell the school he had mono so he didn’t have to go back. She hoped that over this summer she could get him back on track. The only reason he isn’t being held back is because his mom is very charming when she needs to be, and she loves her son, so she needed to be. 

He and Gina had walked to school together. He was still wearing the same clothes from yesterday, but she was talking a mile a minute, and if she noticed, she chose not to comment. 

By the weekend, Jake had hung out with his friend Alan three times, so he now had three new scabs collected on his wrist. They were small, nearly-perfect circles left from the end of Alan’s cigarettes.

This, Gina had noticed. She’d threatened to tell his mom, and Jake couldn’t stand the thought that his mom might see him differently, after she knew, so he marched into the kitchen and said he wanted to go to therapy again.

Which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Jake says none of this to Laurie. In fact, he waits out most of the session by pulling at loose strings on the end of his hoodie’s sleeves. 

 

The following week, his session goes about the same.

 

By the third session, he’s tired of what Laurie calls his “filibustering.” He tells her about how good it feels to burn himself, how he sometimes thinks about not being alive anymore, how he doesn’t want to hurt his mom’s feelings but he feels so far away from her. He wants Laurie to flinch. Wants to see how destructive he can be, take it out on someone other than himself. But Laurie just listens. Sometimes she nods.

When he’s worn himself out she says, “Well, that’s a start.”

 

Laurie refers him to a psychiatrist who Jake refuses to call by anything except Doctor. He thinks it’s stupid that there’s a type of doctor who specializes in sadness. He says as much when he first sits down with Doctor. In the end, he leaves with a script for Prozac.

 

A month into taking his meds, his prescription needs to be refilled.

“Next time we go out, we need to pick up your script,” his mom tells him.

“My script? I’m already off book! I know all my lines.”

She laughs. And, really, that’s one of the only reasons he ever tries to be funny. Because it makes his mom happy. It makes him feel good to hear her laugh.

“I’ve missed this,” she says in her very serious and very sincere mom voice. 

Jake thinks for a moment. “Yeah, me too.”

 

Things aren’t really all that much better. They are a little different. Jake sleeps almost exclusively at night now. And he can keep food down most of the time. But he still feels like shit. He still uses his wrist as an ashtray at every available opportunity, which, admittedly, is less than it used to be when school was still in session. 

Alan’s older brother buys him the cigarettes. Jake can’t stand the smell. Or the taste. But he has to make the embers glow orange if he wants the feeling of release, so he inhales just a little at the end of each of Alan’s cigarettes. 

He can’t really remember what first gave him the idea. He’d been watching Alan’s mouth as he smoked. He liked the color, how it glowed from red to orange. How the smoke tangled around Alan’s hand. How it billowed from between his lips. Alan was always scowling, no matter how good of a joke Jake made. It had been part of the early appeal of their friendship, making Alan laugh. 

This turned out to be quite a challenge, but after learning about the way Alan’s dad treated him and his mom, two things became clearer to Jake. 1. His own dad wasn’t a monster. An asshole, maybe. But not a monster. And 2. Gallows humor was the way to Alan’s heart.

And Alan’s heart Jake had won. The two of them spent every possible moment together, often cutting classes to hang out behind the shed near the football field. Sometimes Alan would pull Jake into him and kiss him, right there in the open. But whenever he pulled away he was crying, or sometimes yelling. He’d be so angry with Jake for letting him do it, or sometimes he accused Jake of making him do it, which made Jake feel so dirty after it inspired him to take a long shower under water that made his skin bloom bright red.

Jake quickly learned better than to mention the kissing. Not ever. Not to anyone. It was right up there with the burns in the lists of secrets Jake had learned to keep. 

 

The new school year starts and "mono" has to resolve itself some time. Jake goes into his junior year hoping for small improvements from last. That’s what Laurie had told him to focus on when he was so panicked he couldn’t breathe. Small improvements. Talk to some new people, try to focus in class, don’t hurt yourself. 

It seemed a manageable list until lunch when Alan was shaking a pack of Camels and jerking his head in the direction of the exit. Jake followed and their time together went apace. 

 

“How have the urges been?”

“You know I hate when you use words like that,” Jake says without malice, only an exaggerated wince and then a smirk. 

“What word would you like me to use?”

“Call it what it is, I guess.”

“Have you burned yourself recently?”

Jake throws his head back and laughs. “You know, you’re terrible at this. That was _no_ better.”

Laurie had smiled but she quickly regains composure. “Are you going to keep avoiding my question?”

“I haven’t seen much of Alan recently. He doesn’t seem to want to be around me anymore.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“You can’t be serious. What a cliche! Are those even allowed?”

“A lot of therapy is cliches,” she shrugs. “To get more to the point…”

“I’m nine weeks clean. See?” He rolls up his sleeve and proudly displays the healed scars. They’re roundish and purpling. Not red or blistered or peeling. 

“That’s wonderful, Jake.”

 

Alan runs away from home over Christmas break. Jake doesn’t hear about it until everyone’s back at school and talking about it. A few of his classmates ask him questions about Alan, but out of old loyalty to his friend, he claims not to have known him that well.

In some strange way, he’s glad for Alan. Mostly, he’s scared at having been left alone at school.

But he isn’t alone, as Laurie reminds him. He’s made new friends, developed healthier, less codependent relationships.

Still, though, Jake finds himself missing the smell of smoke.

 

There’s a slight blip in the recovery track by midterms. Jake is so stressed about exams and college and what he wants to do with his life. A year ago, he’d been thinking of killing himself. Now, he wants his life to mean something. If he’s going to die, he wants it to be for the right reasons. Ideally a blaze-of-glory kind of situation. 

Gina’s talking with her mouth full at the lunch table when she notices a long scratch across the width of Jake’s arm.

“What’s that,” she asks, pointing with her fork and throwing a bit of salad dressing with the gesture.

“It’s nothing. I saw a stray cat on my way home from school yesterday and I went to pet it and it scratched me.”

“Try again.”

“Excuse me?”

“You see, this is why you’ll never be a good detective. You have to be a good liar to notice a good lie. And that was pathetic. Honestly.”

“Okay,” he agrees, because it’s always easier to go along with Gina than to fight her. She’s like that improv class that she dragged Jake to once. The answer is always ‘yes.’ “How would I do better?”

“Well, first, you’d remember that you and I walked home together yesterday.”

“Maybe I saw the cat after you left.”

“You called me last night and didn’t mention it.”

“I was distracted by my mom watching Wheel of Fortune.”

“Wheel of Fortune is on at 3, you called me at 5. Jake, when are you gonna learn?”

He shrugs. “Teach me.”

 

He and Gina go back to his Nana’s apartment after school. She’s written what appears to be a color-coded cheat sheet to lying, but really the colors change for no reason other than Gina’s whims. 

“First thing’s first, you have to give fewer details. Can’t get caught up in facts if you haven’t really provided any.”

He smiles and nods. He hadn’t been entirely serious about learning how to lie, but Gina seems interested, so he plays along. 

“Second, your eyes look sad when you’re lying. You have to school your face. Keep it as natural as you can without overthinking it. Don’t look right at the person’s eyes. Think about something else, if you have to.

“C. Distract.”

“They were numbers earlier, now we’re doing letters.”

“Focus, Jake. God, this is too easy.”

“Oh!” It’s actually pretty clever, when he thinks about it. 

“Four, always go for plausible deniability. If you think you can get away with it, say you don’t know or can’t remember.”

By the end, he’s glad she’s written notes. Even though they come with examples that make very little sense and seem like they were more likely written by a manic serial killer than a sixteen year old girl. 

 

“Hey, honey, how was school?”

Jake drops his bag on top of the pile of shoes they keep by the front door. “It was fine.”

“Anything interesting happen?”

“Not really.”

He goes into the kitchen where his mom is sitting at the table, surrounded by paperwork. “Kind of a boring day, huh? I’m having one of those myself. The list, it never ends, huh?”

He laughs a little to be polite, grabs a bottle of water from the fridge, and heads towards his room.

“Hey, Jake, before you go…”

He pauses in the doorway without looking back.

“You haven’t seen the scissors, have you?”

He shakes his head. “No, I haven’t.”

"God, I must’ve torn the kitchen apart earlier looking for them.”

“They’ll turn up, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.” She shuffles some papers around and he glances back. They’re all receipts from his therapist. The phone is sitting out of its cradle in the middle of one pile. She must be calling the insurance company again. 

His mom notices him staring as she searches the table for something. “You okay?”

He smoothes out his face. “I’m fine. And, if you’re looking for your pen, too? It’s behind your ear.”

She reaches up and takes it, offering Jake a thankful smile.

“Are the scissors up there too?”

She laughs. 

 

It takes Jake a few more weeks of smiling and joking to convince his mom that everything’s all better. He’d have had a harder time if it was Laurie he had to convince, but she wasn’t the one paying the bills, she was charging it.

“This’ll be my last session.”

“I heard,” Laurie sighs. “Are you sure about this?”

“You’ve healed me. I’m all better. You and Doctor are lifesavers, really. My favorite candy. But your work here is done.”

“Jake, it’ll be dangerous to come off your medication all at once. Keep seeing your psychiatrist long enough that he can ween you off.”

“But I’m better now, I don’t need the meds.”

“Still, you’ve been on them-“

“Long enough. I actually took myself off them a few weeks ago. To show my mom they weren’t necessary anymore. Didn’t even fill my last script. I’m done. Graduated from therapy. Did I get an A?”

Laurie shakes her head. “We still have a lot of work to do, Jacob. Therapy can’t be rushed.”

“Two years isn’t rushing!”

“It’s only been a little over a year, and yes, in terms of getting better, that’s no time at all. Think of how many years you spent learning that the kind of love you deserve is something that hurts you. Or how long you’ve been hurting yourself. These things take time to undo, to unlearn.”

“But I’ve got it now. No more human ashtrays. I’m good. I’m all better.”

“Jacob-“

“No,” he says, and the commanding sound of his voice makes him startle a little. He’s never really been taken seriously, has always had a baby face and a voice to match. But he turned eighteen in the spring. He’s a man now. And, if he can muster up the energy, the restraint, he can mimic one pretty well. “No, ‘cuz you see, my mom can’t afford this. And she thinks it’s over and behind us and I really need that to be true. I need it to be over.”

“Money should not be your concern, you’re a child, your mom’s an adult.”

“We’re both adults. And I’m trying this new thing where I’m not mean to my mom anymore. And it isn’t nice to make her work extra hours so I can come here and you can fix me when I’m already fixed!”

He knows he sounds petulant now, the pitch of his voice raising higher with every word. He stands by what he said, though. He needs it to be true, needs this to be over.

Laurie shakes her head again, but she only says, “If you change your mind-“

“I’ll know where to find you."

**Author's Note:**

> there's one more piece and it's already written. i wrote it before this one and then sorta tossed this piece together so i might come back and do some heavy editing, but it'll do for now  
> references to abuse. two minor characters, not jake. it's one line.  
> questions, comments, favorite animal/mineral/vegetable, and concerns all welcome


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